‘I wish everyone on the show was really nice and relatable, and that each hour-long episode was all about the task” is what nobody who watches The Apprentice has ever thought or said. Still, in the spirit of plucky entrepreneurship, that hasn’t stopped the makers of Running the Shop (Channel 4), who have taken the least interesting aspects of The Apprentice, added a twist on Undercover Boss by letting the employees take over the shop, and topped it off with one of the old Dragons from Dragons’ Den, who attempts to do a Mary Queen of Shops on the whole messy concoction.
Hilary Devey, magnificent of face and shoulder pads, kicks off the series with Taskers, a struggling “DIY/homestore” in Aintree. Its MD, John Tasker, who looks a bit like the Rupert Everett offering you’d find in a seaside knockoff of Madame Tussauds, has a motto: “Give people a BMW, charge them for a Ford,” which doesn’t seem like the finest of business acumen to me. Thanks to the internet and encroaching chain stores, Taskers has seen its profits decline by roughly 70% since 2006. “When a business is in trouble, listen to the staff,” counsels Devey, so John puts his team in charge for three weeks and gives them £30,000 of his own money to execute any ideas they might have to save it.
The problem is that Running the Shop could do with some restructuring of its own. It is stuffed to the brim with fake peril, that tedious legacy of reality TV that is supposed to keep an audience hooked but is so overused and trite that it invites cynicism at every turn. Some of the Taskers staff approach local property developers about placing the store’s furniture in their showrooms; to get the gig, they are forced to dress a sample showroom, and be evaluated by Kirsten, whose job is repeatedly described as “showroom doyenne”, which is a new one on me. Kirsten is the villain of the piece, and naturally she rejects their first effort. “At the end of the day, this is business … and nice doesn’t cut it,” she insists, like a woman who knows she is on television and is supposed to be saying stuff like this. It’s hard to escape the sense that it is only there so they have a Dramatic Moment, and it appears to genuinely upset the women, so it leaves a nasty taste.
For a programme otherwise lacking in excitement or thrills, Devey is bafflingly underused. Occasionally she pulls up in her Rolls Royce to tell them they’re all doing a good job, and their ideas are great, and … that’s about it. Devey was responsible for one of the best Desert Island Discs of recent years, and is clearly a strong and intriguing personality, so it’s disappointing to see her playing the role of glorified continuity announcer.
It’s all so desperately familiar. The employees have emotional pasts, or, in the case of Paula, a bad back, which means she finds it hard to work past midnight (there’s that peril again). John Tasker is a micromanager who clearly doesn’t trust his employees to get anything done (though I imagine an hour on primetime Channel 4 during which the name “Taskers” is mentioned dozens of times softened the blow of handing over the reins). Undercover Boss worked because there was a real sense that everyone involved learned something. This is a forced and ineffective replica. Do they improve Taskers’ profits? Well, yes, a bit, but it’s only measured over the course of a few days, when you really want to go back and see how it’s all doing in a year. Mind you, I won’t be going back to see how the show is doing next week, so perhaps that is a tall order.
Stephen Mangan and Anna Maxwell Martin star in Birthday, Sky Arts’ adaptation of Joe Penhall’s play, which debuted at the Royal Court in 2012. I am usually wary of stage-to-screen transfers but this is a tender and well-executed triumph. Maxwell Martin is Lisa and Mangan is Eddie. Lisa gave birth to the couple’s first child; following a traumatic experience of labour, Eddie has offered to carry their second, using new artificial womb technology. We join them an hour after Eddie has been induced and is starting to feel the pain.
Both leads are excellent, but Mangan is outstanding – a barked, “I am calm. I’m fucking calm, so shut up about it!” is a particular highlight – and he resists the urge to ham up the comedy inherent in a man being pregnant. It could have been a cheap and easy way of making men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus-style observations about gender, but Penhall’s script is more sophisticated than that, as both have shared the same experience, yet are aware that they cannot seem to convey that to each other. In that sense, it’s more about love and how to make a long-term relationship work, even when you’re under the most impossible duress and screaming and swearing at each other. It’s touching and tense, and an unexpected delight.
